Friday, April 6, 2012

Tobacco smoke gets in your mind

Howdy !

I missed a couple of days of posting (for which I apologize), but it could not be helped (my low-down excuse).
Today's post is going to be a shorty, but I hope that you all enjoy reading it. Kindly respond with a comment or two - and I don't think that will be too much for which to hope... everyone seems to either enjoy smoking tobacco or hates the whole idea of it. The words should flow quite easily in such instances.

A few years ago I studied and wrote about the radioactivity to be found in tobacco smoke. That sort of became my personal "hot button," but I have not messed around with such things for a time now. Today I decided to go onto the Internet search engines to see if any of my old articles and postings were still around on the Internet like they used to be. So I entered my last name and the initials of my first and middle names and there they were - three pages full of references to my old articles. Most were references to articles written by other people, some in languages that I could not read. A big number of the citations were to papers written by people with marijuana (pot, weed, reefers. etc.) on their minds.

I wondered about that. Why would pot-smoking enthusiasts mention my tobacco radioactivity studies with such frequency? Turns out that they were claiming that marijuana smoke did not contain the same sort of radioactivity that was in tobacco smoke. Thus it was "better for you" than tobacco.

I read some of those "weed" articles. None of them seemed to describe any radioactivity testing of marijuana or its smoke.

Anyway, if you ask the search engines to give you lists of publications that talk about the radioactivity of tobacco smoke, you are almost certain to find that about half of the listings will be all about the virtues of switching to pot-smoking.

Just as an aside to all of this smoking stuff, I met a guy the other day, an old character like me, who, also like me, quit tobacco smoking quite a few years ago. We talked about that for a time, comparing how it went for each of us in our mutual cigarette-smoking quitting. I mentioned that, even after many years had passed since I quit smoking, I will drink a nice cup of coffee and notice that my hand goes to by shirt pocket, patting it for the pack of cigarettes that used to always be there. He smiled and told me that he does the same thing. It was nice to learn that I was not alone in being still hooked on the nicotine addiction - sort of like an alcoholic who is just one small slip away from taking a drink and winding up in the gutter again.